Preserved in the Department
of Prints and Drawings
in the British Museum

In the late 1800s the British Museum began to catalogue
their enormous collection of satirical prints. When the catalogue was
completed nearly a century later, it would consist of 12 thick volumes
of small text that described prints spanning five centuries of British
history. The volumes are accompanied by 32 rolls of microfilm containing
images of the prints. Today there are roughly 17,400 prints in the collection.

Dates

Numbers

Publication
Date

Vol. I

1320-1688

1 - 1235

1870

Vol. II

1689-1733

1236-2015

1873

Vol. III,
pt 1

1734-1750

2016-3804

1877

Vol. III,
pt 2

1751-1760

Vol. IV

1761-1770

3805-4838

1883

Vol. V

1771-1783

4839-6360

1935

Vol. VI

1784-1792

6361-8283

1938

Vol. VII

1793-1800

8284-9692

1942

Vol. VIII

1801-1810

9693-11703

1947

Vol. IX

1811-1819

11704-13500

1949

Vol. X

1820-1827

13501-15496

1952

Vol. XI

1828-1832

15497-17391

1954

The first four volumes written by Frederic George Stephens, catalogued
prints published between 1320 and 1770.

The majority of the Museum's collection consists of prints published
between the mid-1700's and the early 1800's. These were catalogued over
the course of 20 years by Mary Dorothy George. Her detailed descriptions
and careful analysis elucidated the historical events and identified
important themes developed by individual and groups of artists. Her exhaustive
research references a multitude of political, religious and economic
sources.

George went on to write other major works on British caricature including English
Political Caricature to 1792 (1959), English Political Caricature:
A Study of Opinion and Propaganda (1959) and Hogarth to Cruickshank:
Social Change in Graphic Satire (1967).

The Department of Prints and Drawings holds the national
collection of British single-sheet satirical prints from the seventeenth
to the nineteenth centuries. These prints, for the most part, are
listed and described in the Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires
in the British Museum by Frederic George Stephens (four volumes covering
prints up to 1770 and published 1870-1883) and Mary Dorothy George
(seven volumes covering prints between 1771-1832 and published 1935-1954).
This catalogue has formed the basis for all later studies of British
caricature and graphic satire.

From the exhibition catalogue James Gillray: The Art of CaricatureTate Gallery Publishing LTD, London, 2001

Excerpt from the acknowledgements by Richard Godfrey and Martin Myrone

The exhibition is founded upon the scholarship of
the late Mary Dorothy George, whose immense efforts at cataloguing
the British Museum's collection of graphic satires put every student
of the subject eternally in her debt. It would be inconceivable without
the work of the distinguished American cartoonist Draper Hill, who
organised the first major exhibition of Gillray mounted in London
by the Arts Council in 1967. His groundbreaking publications, including Mr
Gillray the Caricaturist (1965) and Fashionable Contrasts:
Caricatures by James Gillray (1966) remain a constant point of
reference for any study of the artist.